Gallium nitride materials include gallium nitride (GaN) and its alloys such as aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN), indium gallium nitride (InGaN), and aluminum indium gallium nitride (AlInGaN). These materials are semiconductor compounds that have a relatively wide, direct bandgap which permits highly energetic electronic transitions to occur. Gallium nitride materials have a number of attractive properties including high electron mobility, the ability to efficiently emit blue light, and the ability to transmit signals at high frequency, amongst others. Accordingly, gallium nitride materials are being investigated in many microelectronic applications such as transistors and optoelectronic devices.
Despite the attractive properties noted above, a number of challenges exist in connection with developing gallium nitride material-based devices. For example, it may be difficult to grow high quality gallium nitride materials on certain substrates, particularly silicon, due to property differences (e.g., lattice constant and thermal expansion coefficient) between the gallium nitride material and the substrate material. Also, it is has been challenging to form gallium nitride material devices meeting the property requirements for certain applications.
Applications for RF power transistors may have particularly demanding property requirements. For example, RF power transistors used in wireless communications (e.g., in wireless basestation applications) may need to meet property requirements related to output power, linearity, gain and efficiency. Emerging third generation (3G) wireless communications standards, such as W-CDMA, use variable amplitude envelope modulation which places even stricter constraints on linearity compared to the second generation standards. To achieve the required linearity to meet 3G standards, certain transistors (e.g., silicon or gallium arsenide-based transistors) used in second generation applications may need to operate at lower efficiencies and/or power levels which may be insufficient for 3G applications.